


Before Summa Cum Laude

by JoAnna Blakeley (xaandria)



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: College, Ficlets, Gen, alcohol use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 02:30:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3878785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaandria/pseuds/JoAnna%20Blakeley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of the lost collegiate moments of Hell's Kitchen's best damn avocados, told in no particular order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ethanol

Two couples had sneaked upstairs to make out; Matt very purposefully excluded them from his circle of awareness. He didn’t want to know what else they were going to get up to. Around him, the party had dissolved into an aimless haze of slurred conversation, exuberant laughter, and the determined self-sabotage of drinking well past the limits of sound judgement.

He’d done some of that himself, much to his chagrin. Not that it took much to go beyond his version of sound judgement: one drink was usually enough to make him wary of the good-natured ease that settled into his bones. The social lubrication was dangerous. And yet, when Foggy had handed him a second glass bottle, cold with beads of condensation running down its wet paper label, Matt had brought to bottle to his lips with hardly a moment’s hesitation.

He considered the taste of this third beer; it hailed from a different bottling plant than other two. Using last year’s barley, hops from no fewer than eight different fields, old-fashioned copper stills. He missed the days when he could taste a thing as the sum of its parts, but it took effort to see the forest for the trees anymore.

Three beers shouldn’t be enough to knock him on his ass, but the assistance of the ethanol was more than sufficient to make loosening his tongue seem like a good idea. The tiny corner of his brain that contained sober, reasonable Matt suggested that going outside – where he was less likely to talk to anyone about things like how many states he was drinking at the moment – would be the best thing he could do at the moment.

He had to consciously remind himself to use his stick to weave his way to the door; not doing so would be suspicious. He doubted he’d have the focus to not use it, now that he considered it. Everything was definitely a bit fuzzier than it normally was, and his center of balance seemed shifted some very few centimeters left, making him stumble against a doorway rather than passing through it.

“Matt? You okay?” Concern, and then an air current to announce that Foggy had approached. Matt groped out and his hand found its customary place at the back of Foggy’s arm.

“Yeah. It’s just hot in here. Outside.” His tongue didn’t seem to have the dexterity it should have had; for some reason he found that funny.

So did Foggy. “Lightweight,” he snorted, but began moving toward the colder end of the temperature gradient, toward the back porch that led to the postage-stamp backyard of the fraternity house.

The damp cold of the February air brought the world into slightly better equilibrium as Matt took a deep breath. The sounds of the party inside, rather than receding, were brought into sharp relief against the susurrus of the city beyond the lanes of the campus. Matt inhaled deeply again as he leaned forward to rest against the railing of the porch with Foggy.

“You hear back yet from Landman and Zack’s about the internship?” Foggy asked. The swish of liquid against glass suggested he was taking another sip of his beer. Lager, half-drunk, getting warm; Foggy had been nursing it for a while.

“Nah.” Matt realized he’d left his own drink inside. Probably for the better. He didn’t need the warm well-being and camaraderie to urge him to talk.

But he wanted to talk. Suddenly, the notion of talking all night seemed like an excellent plan. Come clean. Have at least one person he didn’t have to pretend around. Foggy’d take it well. He’d probably think it was cool. And Matt  _liked_  Foggy. He imagined that everyone liked Foggy, that it was some evolutionary toehold the Nelson pedigree had stumbled upon to just be eminently likable.

And Foggy liked him, Matt knew. Didn’t treat him like a fragile sculpture, adapted to all the little oddities that stemmed from having a blind roommate, even after they’d left the dorms for a campus apartment on their own. Would, Matt suspected, be up for activities outside the normal realm of friendship, if Matt swung that way, which he didn’t, so no point in talking about it if he had no intention of following through.

Following through. He had been thinking about following through on – something. What was it?

Right. Talking. He considered for a moment, brows furrowing as he swept the porch – no, they were alone, for now, the cold affording them some modicum of privacy.

“Foggy? Can I – can I get something off my chest?”

Foggy swallowed. His heartbeat had sped up ever so slightly. He licked his lips. “I know, Matt.”

Matt blinked, startled. “You…you do?”

“Yeah.” Foggy took another drink. “About you and…Veronica.”

There was another startled moment of silence before Matt took a breath. “That wasn’t – I –”

“It’s cool,” Foggy continued, the vector of his voice indicating that he was facing toward the yard, perpendicular to Matt. “We were done, she was a free agent, and…I mean, she always liked you better anyway.”

Hurt still lay under the nonchalant veneer of Foggy’s voice; Matt swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep it from you, it just – it never seemed like a good time?”

“It’s never a good time to mention you’re banging – never mind.” Foggy shook his head, finished off his beer. “Do me a favor, Murdock,” he said in a more jovial tone. “Don’t keep secrets for a living. You’re shitty at it.”

Matt forced out a halfhearted chuckle. “Right. I’ll keep that in mind.”

A train horn blew at the train depot near the water. Matt shook his head to clear it a little more, and the words he’d half-formed fell away.

“I think I’d like to go back inside,” he said instead, and Foggy turned to lead the way.


	2. Agitated

“I sent the forms! I sent them!”

“Dude, I saw you send the forms,” Foggy said, exaggerating the calm monotone. “Way before deadline.”

“I sent them as soon as I had the textbook list for this year,” Matt continued, standing up to pace the tiny space between their beds again. “This is a nightmare.”

“Hey.” Foggy’s hand snatched at Matt’s forearm, and Matt let himself be tugged down to sit at the edge of Foggy’s bed. “Breathe. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this…”

“Agitated? Distraught?” Matt suggested.

“I was gonna go with unhinged, but yeah.”

Matt brought his hands up to rub his temples, not caring that he knocked the frames of his glasses askew. “It can take weeks to get braille or audio textbooks. Weeks. I can’t wait weeks.”

“They’ve gotta have something,” Foggy offered. “The ADA -- I mean, you can’t be the first blind kid the school’s ever had.”

“I’m not,” Matt said, threading his fingers together to try and calm himself. “S’why I get a braille copy of all the syllabuses and handouts and all that bullshit. But it’s the Accessibility Office that does all that, and they were supposed to order the books and --”

“And they didn’t,” Foggy cut him off. “We’ve been over that. So.” The bed creaked as Foggy stood up, and a moment later Matt’s backpack was dropped into his lap. Lighter than it should have been, sans the missing textbooks, but enough to make Matt grunt. “Get out your recorder.”

Matt tugged at the zipper, then paused. “My recorder?”

The sound of cloth shifting as Foggy settled back down on the bed. “Yeah. We’re gonna start with the first three case studies in _Tort Law and Alternatives_ , since that's the discussion topic on Tuesday. And then we’re going to go get coffee, because then we’ve got chapters three and four in the comp law book, which is gonna take us until the wee hours.”

Matt realized his jaw was hanging open and he snapped it shut. “You’re -- you’re going to read the textbooks to me?”

“You,” Foggy said as he shifted on the bed, and the papery shuffle of pages accompanied his words, “are _impossible_ to live with when you score less than ninety-six on a test. I’ll need to leave the _country_ if you fall off the honor roll. So until the school gets its head out of its ass and gets you your books --” he cleared his throat. “Rose versus Weyerhauser, 2003.”

“Wait, just a --” Matt pressed the record button on his recorder and Foggy started over. At first Matt didn’t even hear the words; his jaw was clenched too tightly to ward off the pricking at the corners of his eyes as Foggy proved once again to be the friend that everyone wishes they had and no one really deserves.


	3. Who Kills the Spiders?

“YEEEEEAARGH!”

Jolted awake by the shout, adrenaline snapping awareness of everything about the dorm room against his brain like a taut bowstring, Matt rolled out of bed and into a reflexive crouch, hands held up in front of him. Before his heart could beat a second time, he already knew that the windows and door were still closed and locked, the lights still out, and by the relative silence of the street outside, it was somewhere between one and three in the morning.

Foggy, he could tell by the scrabbling sounds of bedding-restricted motion, had not left his bed, though he was frantically trying to. His heart was racing, but the kind of racing that indicated being startled, not actual fear. And aside from Matt’s, it was the only heartbeat in the room. As Matt processed that last detail the hairs at the back of his neck stopped standing up on end and he let his hands fall, just slightly, as Foggy clicked his bedside lamp on.

“I thought it was my hair,” he said in a shaky voice. “Jesus. I wish you could see this thing, Matt. It’s the size of an egg, and it was on my  _face_.”

“What is it?” Matt asked, though he could identify the tiny pizzicato footfalls of the spider, now that he was listening for it.

“Really,  _really_  big-ass spider,” Foggy said, now standing next to the bed. “In my _bed_ , dude.” He must have looked up then, because he snorted. “And what are you doing?”

Matt realized he was still in his fighter’s crouch and he straightened hastily. “Uh, nothing. Nothing.”

“Didn’t look like nothing.” Foggy seemed to be enjoying the prospect of deflecting some of the embarrassment onto Matt. “You going to kickbox the spider into submission?”

“I didn’t know it was a spider – the way you screamed I thought someone was stabbing you,” Matt retorted, feeling his ears grow warm.

“I screamed in a very manly surprised-man fashion,” Foggy replied, now rooting around on his desk. “Because there was a goddamned tarantula on my face.”

It wasn’t a tarantula. Tarantulas sounded like they were wrapped in cotton balls. “Is it really a tarantula?” Matt asked.

“No, it’s worse, it’s like some sort of degenerate fugitive from Australia. It was going to hide behind my clock and lay eggs in my sinuses while I slept.” Foggy paused. “I’ve run into the one problem of having a blind roommate: I have to kill the spiders.”

“So what’s stopping you?”

“This one will probably fight back. I have to say, I like its odds.”

“Can you still see it, or did you scare it into hiding with your very manly shriek?” Matt hadn’t heard it move for some time, but then, he’d stopped paying such close attention once it had been made apparent they were not going to be eviscerated.

“It was threatened by your totally legitimate kung fu posture. It’s in my pillowcase.” Foggy made a shuddering sound, accompanied, Matt was sure, by an actual exaggerated shudder. “So much for ever sleeping again.”

“You’re scared of spiders?” Matt teased.

“I’m not scared, I’m – it’s an evolutionary advantage, Murdock!” Foggy retorted. “You’d be scared too, if you could see this thing.”

“Egg-sized?”

“Egg-sized. No lie. Mostly legs,” Foggy amended, “but it is definitely capable of giving anyone both heebs and jeebs. I can see its eyes, Matt. Its beady little primordial eyes. It wants blood.”

Foggy took a deep breath and his heart rate spiked just before there was a flurry of motion; the sour adrenaline in Matt’s veins tried to rally itself again and he resisted the urge to fall back into a defensive stance. “Did you get it?” Matt asked.

“It’s under a Dunkin’ Donuts cup,” Foggy reported. “Oh god, it can move the cup. I tried to trap a murderous eight-legged demon and now it’s just angry and smells like french roast.”

“Just slide a book or something under it and take it outside. Or drop it out the window,” Matt suggested.

“It’ll survive, and don’t tell me it won’t remember me.”

“Foggy, it’s – what time is it?”

“Two fifteen.”

Matt groaned as he lowered himself onto the edge of his bed. “It’s two fifteen in the morning. Either kill it or throw it out the window or let it have your bed forever, but I have to be awake in four hours, so whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”

“Right.”  Matt could hear Foggy squaring his shoulders, as though he were about to go face a difficult professor or talk to some cute girl, and then, faster than Matt would have warranted, Foggy swooped from the bed to the window, threw the window open, and slammed it back shut. “There.”

“It’s done?” Matt asked as he pulled his blankets over him.

“I threw my pillow out the window. Everything is okay now.”

Matt snorted, settling back against his own blessedly spider-free pillow. Apparently Foggy was going to end the event with dignified silence, because he clicked off the lamp without another word, bed creaking and blankets rustling.

Matt was on the edge of sleep when Foggy’s groggy voice asked, “You thought someone was stabbing me?”

“Seemed logical,” Matt replied thickly.

“And you were gonna fight him. For real. You looked – you looked  _serious_.”

Swallowing, Matt cast about for a reasonable reply. “I can’t guarantee I could actually land a punch, but…yeah, man. What else could I do?”

A pause, then, quietly, “I’ve got your back too, you know.”

Matt felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “Even against spiders?”

“Well, you sure as shit can’t do anything about them.”

The temptation to tell Foggy exactly where his giant spider was at that very moment (venturing further into the pillowcase outside on the fire escape) was strong. Matt turned it into a mumbled “Shut up and go to sleep” instead, which Foggy returned with a soft exhaled laugh.

Quiet settled back over the room as they both reclaimed sleep, and if spiders slept, it would have counted itself lucky to sleep half as well as the two young men on the other side of the window, secure in both the strength of their friendship and their dominion over spiders. For now. 


End file.
